Golf

Share.

Is it Mario or just a close likeness? Either way, check out this emulated NES game on the GBA.

By Craig Harris

With the introduction of Animal Crossing on the GameCube this September, players who own a Game Boy Advance and a Game Boy Advance GameCube cable can download any Nintendo Entertainment System game acquired in the adventure to their portable system and take the game on the go. All players need to do is select "Advance Play" when prompted, and the game will be sent through the cable to the GBA system. Five seconds later, players can disconnect the cable and take the game with them.

One of the NES titles available in Animal Crossing is Golf, a game that shipped with the original batch of NES games when the system was released in the US in 1986. Because the game's an early design, there aren't a whole lot of frills in the package. It's pretty much a simple 18 hole challenge. But simple is a misleading word...the game's a challenge because of its simplicity. You have to eyeball your distances once off the tee, and you'll have to learn how far a club will get you down the fairway. There's no way you'll be able to pick this game up and instantly shoot par...it'll take a few times around the course before you finally get it.

The big debate: who are you golfing as in Golf? Some people say it's Mario. But other than the big nose, belly and mustache, this dude just doesn't have the same features. He's tall, and he lacks the plumber's hat and suspenders. So, is it Mario or just some generic dude on the course? Hmm...

Other than the odd, slightly squished appearance to the graphics, Golf runs 100% accurately on the Game Boy Advance. The GBA system has the same button layout for the game, with its A, B, and Start and Select controls. The sound and gameplay are identical on the portable as they were on the Nintendo Entertainment system almost two decades ago.

By hitting the L and R buttons together, players can opt to "reset" the NES (exactly like hitting the Reset button on the actual NES system), or put the game in Sleep Mode. Because the game sits resident in the Game Boy Advance memory, if players turn off the system, the game's wiped out from the system; players will have to re-download the game to the system to play it on the GBA again. Sleep mode essentially turns off the system without hitting the power switch...minimal battery power is used to keep the game resident in memory. GBA owners have stated that they've left their GBAs in sleep mode for about a week without the batteries dying on them.

Because the NES's resolution is slightly higher than the Game Boy Advance LCD resolution (NES: 256x240, GBA: 240x160), the emulator for the GBA has to do a bit of technical trickery to get the whole resolution to work on the LCD screen. The vertical resolution is actually negligable, since the first eight and the last eight lines of the NES resolution were generally not used, bringing the width of NES games to fit the GBA screen perfectly. It's the height that it has to worry about; to get the game to look accurately (albiet slightly squished) on the LCD screen, the emulator actually does a scanline swap every 1/60th of a second. To the human eye, all that's noticable is a slight "shimmy" or "flicker", but most people won't notice a thing. The trick actually makes the NES games look slightly anti-aliased.

Incidentally, this flicker trick makes it extremely difficult to capture accurate screen grabs and video off of the Nintendo development tools, since the capture equipment grabs frames at 1/60th of a second, and video at 30 frames per second...you'll notice a few pixels missing, but they'll be on the screen when you play the game. Trust us. But we've grabbed footage of the game in action, which you can access by hitting the link at the bottom of this preview.